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Strange Angel

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Strange Angel

The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons

For the past two years, a pair of robot vehicles, each the size of a golf cart, have been exploring the surface of Mars. The robots were created by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, which was also responsible for the first spacecraft to orbit another planet (Mariner 2, around Mars in 1962) and the first to land on another planet (Viking 1, on Mars in 1976). In the late 1930s, an explosives genius named Jack Parsons co-founded JPL, which was sometimes referred to as the Jack Parsons Laboratory, with his gang of curious rocketeers known as the Suicide Squad.

Parsons’ legend is the most peculiar chapter in the history of space exploration, told with wide-eyed fascination by author George Pendle in Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons. Parsons’ revolutionary work with liquid propellants and sustained engine-powered rocket flight introduced America to the jet age. Without the Suicide Squad, Neil Armstrong would never have walked on the moon, nor would shuttle flights today ferry crew and supplies to the International Space Station. Despite his respected status as a true rocket pioneer, John (Jack) Parsons was beyond eccentric. As a genuine mad scientist and a dedicated follower of occult figure and sexual hedonist Aleister Crowley, he baffled the scientific community. Parsons however, did not view science and magic as contradictory: “It seems to me that if I had the genius to found the jet propulsion field in the United States, and found a million-dollar corporation [Parsons started Aerojet Corporation, which today employs 2,500] and a world-renowned research laboratory, then I should be able to apply this genius to the magical field.”

Parsons began playing with explosive black powder as a teen in the Southern California desert just before the Depression hit. Mixing chemicals to create explosives to launch crude bamboo rockets, he soon realized that in order to achieve the dream of reaching the moon, a sustained flight required liquid fuel-powered engines that could fire repeatedly. After high school, he supported his family with work as an explosives expert at the Hercules Powder Company in California. The family fortune disappeared after the 1929 stock market crash. Before then, a limousine took Parsons to school daily. He continued his desert rocket experiments and started informal discussion groups that included his Suicide Squad comrades and writers of science-fiction pulp stories obsessed with interplanetary travel. Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov often attended meetings.

Members of the American Communist Party also began showing up at meetings. Their inclusion in the book adds an element of intrigue to a story of good guys, bad guys, and those caught along the blurred line that separates the two. Though he declined to join the organization, Parsons’ loose affiliation with the Communists would come back to haunt him as World War II evolved into the Cold War. His security clearance to work on government projects was removed and reinstated several times. Meanwhile, Joe McCarthy would pick off several of Parson’s pals one by one.

Interestingly, Parsons had earlier been in regular communication with Wernher Von Braun, the German scientist who built the V-2 missile for the Nazis and who was later primarily responsible for designing the rockets that put Americans into orbit. Ironically, Von Braun never hesitated to share ideas with Parsons and his friends in the 1930s. The father of American rocketry, Robert Goddard, however, refused to help the young Suicide Squad when they visited his laboratory in Roswell, New Mexico. That Goddard lived in a desert city which would later become best known as the place where an alien was supposedly discovered adds an even weirder note to the curious story of Jack Parsons.

Strange Angel is more than weird tales, though. The book is not only a fascinating peek at the history of American rocket science, it also provides glimpses into the world of explosives that anyone fascinated by Fourth of July fireworks should appreciate:

Learning explosives from other workers, Parsons soon discovered such essentials as the difference between a high explosive and a low explosive. A high explosive such as nitroglycerine (the base constituent of dynamite, made by treating a natural by-product of the soap-making process, glycerine, with sulfuric and nitric acids) decomposes into gases in a few millionths of a second, about a thousand times faster than a low explosive such as black powder or gunpowder . . . Because of their rapid and violent detonation, high explosives are better suited for demolition work, while low explosives such as gunpowder are better used as a propellant, pushing projectiles out of gun barrels.>Three-quarters into the story, the most unexpected of antagonists appears in the life of Jack Parsons: L. Ron Hubbard, the mid-century science-fiction writer who stole Parsons’ girlfriend (who was also Parsons’ sister-in-law, a relationship he flaunted in front of his wife) and dashed off to Florida to start the religious cult known as Scientology. Descriptions of Hubbard’s charisma convey the image of an irresistible snake-oil salesman, and readers may subsequently understand how Hubbard would mesmerize Hollywood’s finest decades later.

Parsons does not meet with a happy ending. Having forsaken much of his dark-side infatuation as he approached 40, he met his fate in an ugly but predictable manner. Lying on the ground with half his face blown off and one arm missing amidst the rubble of an explosives accident, he died at age 38. The explosion was determined to be the result of the mad rocket scientist’s careless insistence on mixing explosives in a coffee tin rather than reliable chemical flasks. Regardless, his short but fascinating life had lived up to the original birth name his mother later changed to John: Marvel Whiteside Parsons. Decades later, JPL scientists named a crater on the dark side of the moon “Parsons Crater.” &

Lift-off Letdown

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Lift-off Letdown

A report from the Discovery launch pad.

By Ed Reynolds

July 28, 2005

In 1961, NASA launched the first American into space aboard the Freedom 7 Mercury spacecraft. I watched on a black-and-white television in my first-grade classroom as astronaut Alan Shepard blasted off into history in a 15-minute flight. Televisions perched on teachers’ desks for NASA launches soon became a schoolhouse tradition as the two-man Gemini spacecraft replaced the Mercury series, which was subsequently replaced by the three-man Apollo missions that eventually put Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969.

The advent of the space shuttle as a reusable spacecraft capable of landing on a runway made space travel routine. Complacency soon replaced curiosity and awe in the public mind. The explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 briefly jolted that indifference. Over the next 17 years, however, shuttle missions again became commonplace and predictable. That is, until February 1, 2003, when Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas as it re-entered the earth’s atmosphere at 17,000 mph. A couple of weeks earlier during the liftoff of Columbia, a suitcase-size chunk of foam insulation that weighed a pound and a half fell from the bright orange external tank that provides liquid oxygen and hydrogen to fuel the spacecraft as it leaves Earth. The foam insulation prevents ice formation and helps keep the liquid oxygen in the upper section of the tank chilled at minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit and the liquid hydrogen at minus 423 degrees in the lower section. Foam has always fallen off the external tank during liftoff to harmlessly strike the craft, but on this particular launch, the debris hit the left wing of the orbiter Columbia. The foam ripped a hole that allowed hot air and gases to penetrate Columbia when it returned to Earth [the hole was not a threat while Columbia was in the vacuum of space], tearing the spacecraft apart in seconds and burning to death all seven crew members as they plunged to the ground.

After a two-and-a-half-year delay, NASA has decided that it’s time to fly again. The mission has been dubbed Return to Flight. The initial launch period targeted for fall 2004 was rejected, and May 2005 was chosen instead. Heightened concern about falling ice damaging the orbiter (just as foam had done to Columbia during liftoff in 2003) prompted more testing, pushing the launch date back to mid-July.

Two days before the launch of Discovery, the Kennedy Space Center was bustling with activity. Satellite news trucks and television crews secured ideal spots to telecast the July 13 launch. Inside the press room, stacks of information were available, as was a video and photo library. Scale models of the shuttle were displayed so NASA officials could better explain the intricacies of the spacecraft to reporters. An afternoon bus tour took a media contingent out to the launch pad, but the shuttle was obscured by the gray servicing structure that functions as scaffolding to allow continued work on Discovery.




Space Shuttle Discovery is carried back to the launch pad aboard the shuttle crawler transporter. (click for larger version)

Dr. Michael Griffin, a former NASA engineer, is NASA’s eleventh administrator. A relaxed, confident man, he’s been in charge of America’s space program since April of this year after a management shake-up. NASA officials readily admit that the agency had grown lax concerning safety in a deadly enterprise. “It’s a dangerous business, and it will be for the foreseeable future,” he explained at a Tuesday afternoon briefing to update the media on the status of the next day’s launch. “We work every time to make it less dangerous than the time before.” Referring to the current state of NASA as “the most difficult period in the history of American space flight,” Griffin emphasized the importance of outer-space exploration: “I believe that it is important for America to be the preemininent space-faring nation in the 21st century. . . . I think the proper purpose of the United States civil space program is to explore, develop, understand, and discover the solar system, and extend the range of places where human beings live and work. We’re at the very beginning of that right now. Technology is primitive compared to what we would like it and need it to be. The expense is great; the risk is very significant. But we will never be where we want to be if we don’t take these first steps.”

The mission of STS-114 Discovery (STS stands for “space transport system,” and it is the 114th flight of a space shuttle) is to bring supplies to the International Space Station, return experiments and garbage from the space station to Earth, and test repair techniques during scheduled EVAs (extra vehicular activities, or “spacewalk”) developed to address any debris damage to the orbiter Discovery. This shuttle mission has no “substantive” repair capabilities, as only repair experiments will be conducted. Should Discovery be too damaged to return to Earth, the seven-member crew would share the space station with its current two-member crew until Space Shuttle Atlantis arrives as a rescue ship six weeks later.

Lingering reporters were warned that they would be left behind and no doubt shot if discovered by security guards. It’s hard to tell if our escort was kidding.

Following Michael Griffin’s briefing, the media gathered outside for the bus ride to view the rollback of the rotating service structure. The trip is a NASA ritual that gives photographers the opportunity to take photos of Discovery at sunset, with the scaffolding rolled away to reveal the orbiter, rocket boosters, and external tank. Suddenly, the drama that had slowly been building that day erupted without warning as word began to spread among the media throng that an accident had occurred at the launch pad. Reporters returned to the press building as NASA press liaisons explained what they knew of the problem. A plastic window covering the roof of the orbiter Discovery had inexplicably fallen off, plunging 65 feet, where it damaged a fragile heat shield tile covering one of the engines near the tail of the spacecraft. One surprised NASA official admitted he’d never seen such a freak occurrence at the launch pad.

It was the first glitch in an otherwise smooth preparation for the next day’s launch. Up until that point, the main worry had been the weather. On Tuesday, Space Shuttle Discovery had a 60-percent chance of favorable conditions to launch. Favorable conditions include no thunderclouds within 20 miles of either the launch pad or the 15,000-foot landing runway five miles away. Lightning is the major concern, though on this particular mission a heavy cloud cover would obscure the many cameras being used by airplanes tailing Discovery’s ascent to check for any debris damage, forcing the launch to be possibly canceled. Apprehension grew among the media that the launch would be scrubbed.

At 6:30 Tuesday evening, NASA announced a 7 p.m. briefing regarding the falling window cover and spacecraft damage assessment. Fifteen minutes later, the briefing was pushed back to 7:30. Suddenly a photographer dashed into the press briefing area to announce that the problem had been solved and the buses were leaving for the launch pad. The press conference room emptied as the media ran for the buses. The contingent of about 150 photographers and reporters gathered 100 yards from the launch pad at 7:30, waiting for the half-hour rollback of the service scaffolding to begin in anticipation of the 8:30 sunset. Two hours went by without any movement of the service structure as more work was performed on Discovery.

The mosquitoes at the launch pad are vicious monsters that bite through clothing. Kennedy Space Center is a veritable jungle of menacing beasts; a day earlier, alligators were spied in the marshy wilderness within the space center acerage. Buzzards sit in trees, adding an ominous reminder of the danger of returning to outer space. To combat the mosquitoes, members of the media lined up to be sprayed from a single can of insect repellent wielded by one of the NASA escort officials. The can was emptied within an hour, so everyone retreated to the buses to wait in the air conditioning. At 10 p.m. six buses abruptly pulled up next to the press buses. A NASA official boarded each press bus and warned in no uncertain terms that anyone who pointed a camera in the direction of the newly arrived buses would have their media badge taken away. We later learned that these buses were carrying family and friends of the Discovery crew and NASA VIPs.

Within half an hour of the VIP arrival, the service structure rollback began. By 11 p.m., Space Shuttle Discovery was revealed in its entirety a mere football field away, illluminated by spotlights. After half an hour of taking photos, our NASA escort urged the media to return to the buses for the ride back to the softball fields five miles from the Kennedy Space Center. The softball park functioned as a parking lot. Lingering reporters were warned that they would be left behind and no doubt shot if discovered by security guards. It’s hard to tell if our escort was kidding.




(click for larger version)

At midnight I arrived back at my car. Since I planned to be at Kennedy Space Center at 4 a.m., there was little point in driving to Orlando where I was staying. Napping in my automobile in the sweltering Florida heat was impossible, so I drove half an hour to Titusville to a 24-hour drugstore to replace the sunglasses I’d lost at the launch pad earlier that evening. Another hour was spent in a Cocoa Beach Waffle House, where the toothless cook told me his brother had been a student in Miami of Christa McAuliffe, the school teacher killed in the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger. I didn’t tell him that McAuliffe was teaching in Connecticut when she got the opportunity to fly on Challenger.

At 4 a.m. I boarded one of the Bluebird schoolbuses NASA uses to ferry the media to the space center. Individual vehicles were allowed onto Kennedy Space Center only if there were at least three passengers. Single drivers and foreign media were required to take the buses.

I shared my bus with three members of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and a pair of French reporters. Our bags were checked before we boarded, but the inspector failed to give the driver a “search placard,” indicating that passengers had already been through security. This meant that at the checkpoint a mile from the entrance to Kennedy, our bus was told to return to get the search placard. When the Canadian television broadcaster asked the security guard if we could simply be searched again, as he had a 5:30 a.m. live remote broadcast to do, the guard said he was just following NASA orders, and that all incoming buses must show a search placard on launch day. “That’s an idiot decision!” the Canadian thundered. Apologizing, the guard politely told the television reporter that there was nothing he could do. The Canadian responded, “The next time you talk to NASA, tell them I think you’re the biggest asshole I’ve ever met!”

At 5 a.m. I walked into the quiet press building. There was little activity as a half dozen reporters and a handful of NASA officials prepared for a busy day. Outside, the 20-by-10-foot countdown clock glowed in the dark as the minutes ticked away. Behind it lay a lagoon, with Space Shuttle Discovery in the distance bathed in floodlights that reached several hundred feet into the sky. Suddenly, a soothing female voice came over the space center’s outdoor audio system. “At 4:45 this morning, space shuttle crew and managers met and gave a ‘go’ to proceed with the tanking operations [filling the tank with liquid hydrogen and oxygen] for the launch attempt this afternoon for the STS-114 Return to Flight mission.” The voice came from the audio broadcast of NASA Television, which has monitors throughout the space center facilities detailing updates on the planned launch. As I walked around the empty field in front of the countdown clock, the sun began to turn the lower sky a neon orange. The broadcaster continued to reel off details of the mission over the speakers when it hit me that her voice was eerily similar to the woman’s public-address voice in the spaceport in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A malfunctioning heater associated with one section of the orange external tank forced a 90-minute delay in beginning the tanking process. Again, worries mounted that the launch would not happen that day. By 7 a.m., the heater had been repaired and the three-hour fueling began. Unfortunately, NASA’s weather monitors had downgraded launch probability to 40 percent from an earlier 60 percent. Most of the morning was spent monitoring NASA TV and the sky overhead. July weather on Florida’s Atlantic coast is unpredictable, and the dark thunderclouds rolling by were an aggravation. A 10 a.m. interview with famed Apollo flight director Gene Kranz (he coined the famous phrase, “Failure is not an option!”) briefly took my mind off the rolling clouds. As the astronauts rode to the launch pad at noon to enter orbiter Discovery, a thunderstorm began in earnest. An anxious mood flooded the press building as pessimists and naysayers speculated that there would be no launch.

An hour later, the rain stopped and a gorgeous blue sky lit up the Kennedy Space Center. Menacing thunderheads hovered near the outskirts. It was 2 hours and 50 minutes until blastoff and the air was charged with excitement, which grew with each 15-minute weather update. The dark clouds appeared to be blowing inland. With the countdown clock ticking at 2 hours and 33 minutes, the audio on NASA TV suddenly warned that a fuel sensor had malfunctioned. Two minutes later, NASA officially scrubbed the launch. I felt like a four-year-old who had been told that Santa was not coming this Christmas. As of press time, the intermittent failure of the fuel sensor had yet to be resolved. This was not the first time the device had malfunctioned during the past few months.

Space Shuttle Discovery was rescheduled for launch on Tuesday, July 26, but I won’t be there. I’ll be watching a telecast, as I did 44 years ago on a little black-and-white television set. Only this time, I’ll be watching in color. &

The Real Man in the Moon

Of all the people who fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, Gene Kranz is probably the most integral. Kranz was the crusty, determined flight director of the Apollo 13 lunar-landing mission in 1970 that had to be aborted after a series of system failures in midflight. He was portrayed in the Apollo 13 movie by actor Ed Harris, and immortalized the famous line, “Failure is not a option.” That statement summed up NASA’s tenacity as Kranz, and the the flight team he led, saved the Apollo 13 crew from almost certain death. —Ed Reynolds

Black & White: I know you’ve been told this a million times, but the Apollo 13 mission is the most exciting true story I’ve ever heard.

Gene Kranz: “[Laughing] Apollo 13 was just one of the stories, so I was surprised when the movie came out. But America is not familiar with the many close calls we had during the lunar program. To put it bluntly, risk is the price of progress. Risk is the nature of exploration. And I thank God that we have risk-takers and the astronauts and the people in launch control and the people in mission control who are willing to control the risks to allow us to see solutions to problems in the majority of the very difficult and complex missions we fly. On Apollo 11 we almost ran out of fuel, down to 17 seconds. Very dicey land/abort position. On Apollo 12 we were hit by lightning. Apollo 13, you know the story . . . Apollo 16, in order to get into lunar orbit we had to solve a problem with the steering engines. So this business of risk and risk management, and basically controlling risk, making the level of risk acceptable, is the nature of the beast.”

B&W: Though technology during the Apollo program was less sophisticated than what NASA has today with the space shuttle, Apollo only lost one crew whereas the shuttle program has lost two crews. How do you explain the discrepancy with advanced technology?

Kranz: We’ve flown a lot more shuttle missions. Apollo was a relatively tight system, a relatively small system. We had a space system that was designed for a single objective: go from Earth to the moon and then return back to Earth—a difficult mission. But if you think about the shuttle, it deploys satellites, it retrieves satellites, it carries scientific modules in there, it does repair work in orbit, it brings things back from space, it carries stuff up to the space station. The shuttle is a much more complex system than that which we flew during the Apollo programs. I really consider it quite remarkable that during all of the missions that we have flown with the shuttle we’ve only had two accidents.




	Gene Kranz

B&W: Is returning to the moon still important?

Kranz: Oh, heck yes! I think that if we intend to remain a great nation, if we intend to keep the economics of our engine churning out, we have to do difficult things. Going to the moon and Mars is a difficult thing, energy independence is a difficult thing. There are many things that will focus American know-how to develop new technologies, and new technology is the only way we are going to compete with the rest of the word. We can’t out-mass produce them anymore . . . President Kennedy said we choose to go to the moon and other things not because they are easy but because they are hard. Because he recognized that his nation had to do difficult things in order to remain a leader in the world.

B&W: In the Apollo days, did you have any notions or visions that the present shuttle spacecraft would look as it does today?

Kranz: Back in the Apollo day, frankly, the shuttle was the last thing on my mind [laughs]. My job and my organization’s job was, once we had landed on the moon, fly the remaining missions, bring the crew back safely and successfully, move into more difficult landing sites with a diminishing team—because I had to move team members, flight directors, and instructors over to the Skylab program. So once we had finished Skylab, now we could start focusing on the shuttle. We were intimately involved in the design of the shuttle, but it was in the post-’73 time frame . . . Basically, my job during the Apollo era was to really make sure we finished Apollo safely and successfully. We were landing in sites that had mountains that were higher than the Grand Canyon is deep. So we had our hands full.

B&W: Did you ever wish the early astronauts, who had reputations for wild living, were more tame like today’s shuttle astronauts?

Kranz: No, I think the nature of explorers changes. Sort of like mission control. In the early days most of us came in from aircraft flight testing because that was our background right on down the line. We were working with very rudimentary system; technology was very primitive. So we relied upon extremely intense preparation, innovation to a greater extent. The generation today has to be a hell of a lot smarter than we are. On Apollo, we had a computer on board each spacecraft. On board the shuttle now, you’ve got five computers, four of them working in what they call the redundant set, you’ve got a backup system . . . God, when I was deputy director of flight operations, I used to go crazy with these guys bringing me all these problems, and I’d have to go home and study all night long in order to participate in the meetings the next day. So the nature of the technology we are working with and the nature of exploration continues to demand a different kind of people. You think about Lewis and Clark going across the United States—that was the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo generation. &

A WIng and a Prayer

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A Wing and a Prayer

By Ed Reynolds

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September 09, 2004An airborne ballet of soaring tricks and flirtations with disaster will dash through the sky at the Wings and Wheels 2004 air show September 25 and 26 at the Shelby County Airport . Led by AeroShell Aerobatic Team daredevils flying North American T-6 Texans (World War II trainer aircrafts known as “pilot-makers”), the show will feature graceful loops and rolls trailed by white plumes of smoke in a display of precision flying maneuvers. Barnstorming ace Greg Koontz will lead the festivities with an inverted mid-air ribbon-cutting stunt in his Super Decathlon flyer. Koontz, who currently operates an aerobatic school in Birmingham, started performing in air shows in 1974 as a member of Colonel Moser’s Flying Circus, a comedy airplane troupe. He is credited with resuscitating the World’s Smallest Airport routine years ago when he landed a Piper Cub on a moving pickup truck. Koontz puts on a dazzling array of snaps and tumbles, vertical rolls, and outside loops. And, most thrilling of all, Koontz is fond of performing at extremely low altitudes.

The gates open at 10 a.m. each day, and admission is $10 for adults, $2 for youths, and children younger than 5 are admitted free. For more information, call 1-866-246-2376 or visit www.birminghamaeroclub.org for details.

Reaching for the Stars

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Reaching for the Stars

Seven years after the last successful Mars landing, the Mars rover Spirit renews Earth’s fascination with the Red Planet.

By Ed Reynolds

The sight of 3-D glasses on the faces of awestruck observers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory briefly lent a 1950s sci-fi touch to the 2004 Mars Rover headquarters. It had been seven years since a spacecraft had successfully landed on Mars, and the smiles on the faces of scientists, engineers, and reporters as they viewed a panoramic 3-D image from the Mars Rover Spirit encapsulated the excitement of America’s successful return to space.

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Red Planet Fever: An artist’s conception of the Mars Rover Spirit on the planet’s surface. (click for larger version)

Landing on Mars is a supremely difficult task. In 40 years, only 3 of the 36 attempts have been successful. A pair of Viking craft landed in 1976, sending back the first photos of the planet’s surface. It would be 21 years before another mission achieved the same accomplishment: a 3-foot roving robot named Sojourner slowly rolled across the reddish-orange surface in 1997 after parachuting out of the Mars Pathfinder spaceship, spearheading a flurry of attempts by nations, including the United States, to duplicate the amazing feat. None were successful. Some crashed into the planet. Others simply flew right by, such as a 1999 NASA spacecraft whose landing was foiled because a programmer had earlier failed to switch from English to metric units of measurement. Several weeks ago, when it became obvious that it would not be able to land, a Japanese craft was jettisoned out of Martian orbit and on an eternal trip to nowhere. On Christmas Eve, the European Space Agency, a scientific conglomerate of 15 countries, tried to land the British Beagle 2 on Mars. The lander has yet to communicate with Earth and is presumed dead, though the vehicle that carried it on its seven-month journey continues to transmit data about the Martian environment. It was the European Space Agency’s first Mars attempt, made with a shoestring budget of $40 million. The NASA Spirit mission has a price tag of well over $200 million.

The ultimate objective of the rover Spirit is to search for signs of water in Mars’ past—the key to life as Earthlings know it. Polar ice caps presently exist on Mars, and scientists suspect that channels of warm running water may lie beneath the surface, which would perhaps allow some form of life to thrive. The six-wheeled Spirit robot is the size of a golf cart, and it’s equipped with a drill to bore into rocks, then to study them with a microscope and mineral analyzer. It takes at least 10 minutes for commands from Earth, traveling at the speed of light, to reach the Spirit. Therefore, the rover must be “smart enough” to make many of its own decisions, such as how to navigate around hazards that lie in its path. High-resolution stereo vision is employed by Spirit to survey the landscape, hence the reason for using 3-D vision. Infrared cameras locate minerals that could have formed after coming into contact with water at some point long ago. On January 24, an identical rover, Opportunity, is scheduled to land on the opposite side of the planet.

Considering how far we’ve come in the Space Age, it’s ironic that in the week before Christmas, on the 100th anniversary of the first engine-powered flight, experts could not get an exact replica of the Wright Brothers’ airplane off the ground. Two weeks earlier, the space probe Stardust not only beamed back to Earth the best photos ever taken of a comet, but also scooped up dust samples from the nucleus of the comet Wild 2. The probe will deliver the samples in 2006. In July, the U.S. spacecraft Cassini will complete its seven-year journey to set a lander on the surface of Titan, one of the large moons circling Saturn. Space exploration has not been this thrilling since Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon. Appropriately, President Bush has expressed a desire to return to the lunar surface. So have the Chinese, who launched their first taikonaut (the Chinese version of an astronaut) into orbit in October 2003. (China reportedly covets the moon’s abundance of helium 3, a rare isotope that is used in nuclear reactors but is in short supply on Earth.)

What began as a Cold War showdown for interstellar supremacy in 1957 when the Soviet Union beat America into space, eventually evolved into a surprising spirit of cooperation. In the mid-1970s, the United States and Russia docked orbiting spaceships. It was the first crack in the Cold War ice between the two superpowers, leading the way to years of collaboration as cosmonauts and astronauts shared spaceships in a common goal to construct the International Space Station. Talk radio wackos currently warn that the U.S. must establish a foothold in outer space in order to claim a military advantage. It may come to that someday. But for the near future, the spirit of discovery should be the world’s primary reason for embarking on such daunting adventures as space exploration. There’s no telling what we might find. &

Wright Brothers Replica Coming to Town

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Wright Brothers Replica Coming to Town

By Ed Reynolds

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	John Reynolds spent four years building this replica of the Wright Brothers first airplane, which will be in Birmingham on November 15.

A replica of the first engine-powered airplane that Wilbur and Orville Wright successfully flew will be on display at the Southern Museum of Flight from November 15 to 30. Built by John Reynolds and his wife, Carol, the Wright Flyer celebrates the 100th anniversary of the maiden voyage of an aircraft in sustained, controlled flight. Reynolds describes the project as an all-consuming, “almost religious” task that took four years to complete, much longer than he expected. “I thought I could knock it out in about six months. If I knew then what I do now, I probably could have,” he laughs. The biggest obstacle was visualizing the finished airplane in his mind, explains Reynolds, who completed the project with his wife in 1994. “When you’re working off a set of plans, it’s hard to translate that into a three-dimensional image. I found you just had to make it according to the drawings and it would come to itself, so to speak.” Reynolds relied on drawings supplied by the Smithsonian, where the original is on display. The Wright Brothers left no detailed sketches behind, so the Smithsonian had plans drawn when the plane was restored in 1985.

Reynolds was determined to approach problems of construction much as the Wright Brothers did. “I built the aircraft as authentically as I could, if we assume the Smithsonian is the standard. Some of the [original] fabric and pieces of wood just weren’t practical. The Wright Brothers used Pride of the West Muslin [for the wings] and I just used pima cotton, which approximated the same thread count and density.” He’s amazed that many people don’t realize the lasting impact the Wrights had on the future of airflight. “They were scientists and engineers even though they’d never had any formal training in those areas, and the airplane alone has probably seven or eight inventions that are original ideas developed by them. The propeller, they originally invented that. There was no data on aviation propellers. They started their invention using boat props . . . that just goes to show you how amazing these guys were. They weren’t a couple of kids who got lucky. A lot of people think they just kinda cobbled this thing together and just went out there and flew. But that’s not the case at all.”

John and Carol Reynolds will be at the Southern Museum of Flight on November 15 to introduce the Wright Flyer to Birmingham in honor of the First Flight Centennial at Kitty Hawk on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. And yes, Reynolds’ aircraft was built to fly, though it’s powered by a different engine than the Wrights employed. Reynolds has an 18 horsepower Briggs and Stratton tractor engine because he wanted to fly his plane repeatedly. According to Reynolds, the Wright Brothers’ engine can be made “fairly reliable, but it just doesn’t have the reliability to where I felt comfortable with climbing in the plane.” In the decade since he completed the project, he has yet to try it out. “I built it to fly and I plan to, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to put it in the air,” he says. “I think it’ll be best to wait until after the Centennial celebration (December 12 through 17) that way if I break it, I won’t let anybody down who wants to see it.” Reynolds claims he will fly it himself, eventually. “I don’t think I can find anybody else crazy enough to do it.”

Call 833-8226 for details.

—Ed Reynolds

Space Voyager

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Space Voyager

By Ed Reynolds

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April 26, 2001

Astronaut Jim Kelly escaped the confines of gravity for a couple of weeks in March as he embarked on a two week voyage that included the first crew transfer for space station Alpha. Kelly has been an astronaut since 1996, fulfilling a dream that began after his five-year-old imagination was captured by Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon in 1969. Kelly was the first University of Alabama graduate to fly in space.

B&W: Was flying in space everything you expected?

Kelly: Everything and more. Like a trip you can’t imagine.

B&W: At what point did you realize that you had completely left Earth’s atmosphere?

Kelly: The first place you realize it is when you have main engine cut-off. As soon as that happens, you just start floating out of your seat, everything starts floating up from where it is. And you realize you’re some place you’ve never been before. Of course, the ride up is pretty impressive, too. Something that you’ve never felt before; the different forces on your body, the shaking, and the visuals out the window.

B&W: Describe what you saw.

Kelly: Well, when you’re going up, the first thing you see is the main engines of the solid rocket boosters. You see the light out the window in your peripheral vision. And as you go off the launch pad, the first thing we do is a roll program to get us pointed in the right direction, headed basically east, northeast. If you glance out the window, you can see the Earth rolling around as you go up. We launched right after sunrise and headed towards the east. It got brighter and brighter through the first part of ascent as we went towards the sun. But then you get this big blast of light when the solid rocket boosters come off. There are explosive charges that cut the connections between it and the external tank. And you can see the flash pretty much out your front window. As you keep going up, it slowly starts getting darker and darker until you’re in the black of space.

B&W: Is your brain or thought process affected at all by zero gravity?

Kelly: Yeah, it is. It’s kind of funny. As you get more and more used to it, it becomes the natural way of things. If you need to grab something with both hands, and you’ve got something in one hand, say you’ve got a drink or pencil in one hand. Instead of trying to find some place to set it down, you just let go of it. It gives you a chance to do what you want, and you just come back and pick it up. When I got back on Earth, I dropped a fork. It’s one of those things you unconsciously start doing when you get back on the ground if you’re not thinking or if you’re tired because you’ve been up [in space] for a couple of weeks. You just forget, and you have the same habit patterns. That must be a stronger thing for the space station Alpha crew after being up there for four months. You go, “Hey, I don’t need this pencil right now,” and just let go of it and it falls to the ground. And you’re like, “Huh, why did that happen?”

The other thing it changes is your view of the world, in that down here on the ground it’s real easy to figure out what’s up and what’s down. Up in orbit the first couple of days, you have in your mind the Earth version of up and down, which isn’t necessarily the orbit version of up and down. So it takes a little while. You find your brain adjusting to what the new up and down is. And sometimes you’ll be looking at it, and you’ll be one way and three other people will be different ways. All of a sudden you’ll feel your brain shift to a new version of what’s up. And it’s kind of an interesting feeling.

B&W: When we spoke before your flight, you mentioned that the “fly around” (a shuttle maneuver allowing astronauts to eyeball the space station on all sides to check for any problems before returning to Earth) was a particularly big challenge for you as the pilot. Can you elaborate?

Kelly: We undocked and did one and a quarter laps around the space station. We were on the “V-Bar,” which means we were on the front end as the space station flies through space. And we went from the front end to above it, so that the space station was directly between the Earth and us. We could see the space station and the whole Earth beneath it. And from there we did one complete revolution–we went all the way down until we were between the station and Earth, and then all the way back to the top. We did our separation burn from directly above the station.

B&W: How difficult is flying and landing the shuttle?

Kelly: It’s different than any airplane [Kelly is a jet fighter pilot]. Most commercial airliners will come down on a flight path where it’s about a three degree angle off the ground. But for most of the final landing phase, the shuttle is coming down at an 18 degree glide path towards the ground. It’s six times as steep as what you’ll see in a commercial airliner, so obviously you’re coming towards the ground a lot quicker. Plus you’ve just spent two weeks in space. So you’ve gone two weeks at apparent zero G, and we pulled as much as 1.6 Gs coming back in. You’re readjusting to gravity at the same time as you’re flying a vehicle that–to use [shuttle commander] Jim Weatherbee’s words–is a “runaway freight train.” Your body is trying to catch up with gravity, your mind’s trying to catch up, ’cause all of a sudden your inner ear can sense gravity again, which it hasn’t done for two weeks. At the same time you’re flying this vehicle that’s slamming into the atmosphere and heading towards the ground at an 18 degree flight path. You have to stay ahead of it.

B&W: Would it be accurate to say that the landing is as disorienting as the launch?

Kelly: Oh, yeah. But a big difference is that on the launch up, when we go into orbit, if all goes well, between the two of us we each throw one switch. And on our ascent we were fortunate that we didn’t have any anomalies at all. The launch phase is set up where the computer controls everything, and we pretty much just sit on our hands unless something goes wrong. Luckily nothing went wrong, so we basically sat on our hands for the first eight and a half minutes. We were cycling through displays and checking systems and ensuring that everything was going right, and except for one, we didn’t have to throw any switches or make any critical decisions. On entry, that’s not the case. Once you get below Mach 1, it’s a hand-flown vehicle and the commander flies it. The flight engineer is throwing some switches, and it’s a lot more of a hands-on experience coming in for entry than it is on ascent.

B&W: I guess you were aware that Discovery was the name of the spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kelly: Yeah, we sure were. It’s kinda funny. We took DVDs and CDs for our spare time–which, it turns out, you have almost none of. Although we use the CD player and listen to music up there in space. I took some music that some friends gave me to take along. I think, amongst the whole crew, we flew eight or nine copies of 2001. We listened to a bunch of stuff–popular music, things from high school. A couple of others had CDs that friends had made of space-related tunes. We waived off for 90 minutes, which means we were supposed to come down on entry, but the weather wasn’t good enough for us [to land]. So we fired up the CD player with classical music and relaxed for a little while before getting ready to come down on the second landing revolution.

B&W: Shuttle missions include different nationalities, as well as both military personnel and civilians. Is there any type of military protocol, saluting, traditional things, followed on space missions?

Kelly: Not the typical military protocol of “yes sir” and “no sir,” saluting and those kind of things. However, there’s a lot of military tradition that’s been put into the space station. The first change of command ceremony [on the space station] from the Expedition One crew to the Expedition Two crew involved reading out of the ship’s log book and words spoken by all three of the commanders. There was a bell-ringing ceremony, which is a long naval tradition, that is done. So there’s been several really nice military traditions, primarily naval traditions, that have been incorporated into the special events that happen onboard the space station. But as far as day-to-day protocol, there’s not any of that.

B&W: Is there any Russian protocol recognized?

Kelly: Yeah, in Russian culture they’re really big on toasting, and that’s part of the ceremonies–toasting each other, toasting the ground. In this case, it wasn’t literally, obviously, with glasses or anything [laughs]. But they’re very gracious at doing that type of thing.

B&W: Any communication problems between the Russians and Americans?

Kelly: No, as a shuttle crew member it wasn’t required that I know Russian. The three cosmonauts we flew with were all fluent to different degrees in English, and I had no problem communicating with any of them. But our Expedition crew members that go up there [to the space station] to live and work are also fluent in different levels of Russian.

B&W: Are you ready to go to Mars?

Kelly: Oh, I’m ready [laughs]. Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re ready yet. But hopefully sometime during my astronaut lifetime we’ll start heading back to the Moon and Mars. &